Fantastic Infographics, Drawn From A Study of Instagram Selfies

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Selfiecity is a new research project that looks at Instagram data from five cities around the world. Here's a look at the average age of selfie takes in New York City. Hint: It's actually the oldest of the five cities investigated.Image: Selfiecity

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Sao Paulo's average age skews much younger: 22.3 for females and 25 for males.Image: Selfiecity

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Mechanical Turk workers were asked to estimate the age of the photo subjects. This was compared against computer software that also estimated age. Interestingly, the computers typically assigned an older average than its Mechanical Turk counterparts.Image: Selfiecity

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According to this study, women take 80 percent of the selfies in Moscow. This is the biggest gender imbalance of all the cities.Image: Selfiecity

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Berlin is about even with NYC in terms of average age of selfie-takers.

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The median ages and genders per city. This proves that yes, selfies really are a youth thing.Image: Selfiecity

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Selfiecity also looked at visual cues like angle of head tilt. Sao Paulo women were the most expressive with body position and tilt.Image: Selfiecity

The study also looked at the facial expressions as a gauge of emotion. NYC is a moderately smiley city.Image: Selfiecity

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Perhaps not surprisingly, more women than men tend to smile in their selfies.Image: Selfiecity

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Moscow appears to be the grimmest of the cities. Image: Selfiecity

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While Bangkok is the happiest, judging by those who smile in their selfies.Image: Selfiecity

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Right now, there are more than 79 million photos on Instagram that fall under #selfie. This is not counting #selfies (7 million photos), #selfienation (1 million photos), #selfiesfordays (400,000 photos) or the countless number of photos with no hashtag at all. You might be thinking: “Finally, we’ve reached peak #selfie!” But according to a new study, only 3-5 percent of photos on Instagram fall into the category.

“I’m still surprised the number is so low,” says Lev Manovich, a computer science professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY whose name you might recognize from his Phototrails project. Manovich, along data visualization whiz Moritz Stefaner and their team of researcher, historians and designers, spent the past six months gathering Instagram data from five major cities across the world for Selfiecity, a new research project that tries to make sense of the media in social media. How else would we find out that, on average, men only snap 20 percent of the selfies taken in Moscow?

In its short lifespan, the selfie has gone from pop culture phenomenon to academic lab rat. For obvious reasons, these photos are a psychological research goldmine, but there’s been little done in the way of objectively looking at the photos’ content to see how it might reflect the actual world we live in. Selfiecity looks at the trend through a window, not a microscope. Instead of zeroing in on a single narrow element, the Selfiecity project is broken down into a few broad areas: main findings, contextual essays and interactive data visualizations. “We wanted to look at this phenomena from different perspectives,” Manovich explains.

Selfiecity analyzes Instagram data for visual cues like head position, emotional expression, gender and age, in order to get a clearer picture of how (and how often) people actually take selfies in different cultures. “The idea was to confront the generalizations about selfies, which are not based on data, with actual data,” says Manovich. “We wanted to look at what the actual patterns are.”

You can explore the data set by using Selfiecity’s interactive visualization too. Image: Selfiecity

The team’s findings have been compiled into a website where visitors can play with interactive visualizations to investigate what’s going on in any given city’s selfiescape. You can narrow the data set of 3,200 selfies down to photos in Bangkok where males with glasses are smiling with their mouths shut. Or women in Berlin who tilt their heads to the right while frowning. “Showing the high level patterns in the data — the big picture — as well as the individual images has been an important theme in our project,” says Stefaner. “How can we find summarizations of big data collections, which still respect the individuals, and don’t strip away all the interesting details?”

The data gathering was a multi-system process. Manovich’s team began by randomly selecting 20,000-30,000 photos from each city–New York City, Berlin, Bangkok, Moscow and Sao Paolo–between Dec. 4 and Dec. 12, 2013. They submitted the photos to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and asked them to answer a simple question: “Does this photo show a single selfie.”

The Mechanical Turk workers (with help from Manovich’s team) narrowed that set down to a pool of the 640 best selfies from each city and were asked to estimate age and gender of the people photographed. These photos were then processed through software that analyzed the face position and the degree of emotional expressions.

Though statistical analysis, the Selfiecity team discovered a few interesting things:

On average, women tend to take more selfies than men, particularly in Moscow where 80 percent of the selfies are from women. More interesting yet, is the fact that in older populations that trend reverses. After approximately age 40, men are more likely to take and post selfies on Instagram than women.

Women are more likely to tilt their heads in photos, with the average amount of head tilt in women being 150 percent higher than in men. And in Sao Paulo, on average women tilt their heads to 16.9 degrees whereas in NYC, women only tilt their head to 11 degrees.

According to Selfiecity’s mood analysis, people in Bangkok and Sao Paulo appear to be happier than people in Moscow. Or at least they smile more in their selfies.

You can make all sorts of assumptions and cultural stereotypes based on these findings, but the most difficult part about social data is actually putting it into context. There are multiple paths one could take to glean meaning from Selfcities’ data. For instance, what insights can we gather about society and different cultures through selfies? Or what can we learn about popular photography through analyzing mobile photo data? “In our view, projects such as Selfiecity allow us to ask all these questions,” says Manovich.